About Augusta Young

Augusta Adams (Dec. 7, 1802-Feb. 3, 1886). Augusta was born in Beverly (near Lynn), Essex, MA and died in Salt Lake City, UT. She married Henry Cobb, Dec. 22, 1822; in Charleton, Worcester, MA. This couple had seven children. Augusta joined the Mormon church in 1832. Augusta married Brigham Young at Nauvoo on Nov. 2, 1843 after a brief separation from Henry.

Augusta, daughter of John and Mary Ives Adams, married (1) Henry Cobb on December 22, 1822 in Charlestown MA. They had nine children. In 1842, Brigham Young was on a mission in the Boston area and met Augusta. They fell in love and she abandoned all but the two youngest children, and moved to Nauvoo, Illinois. During the journey, her baby boy named Brigham Cobb, died. Once there in Nauvoo, she married Brigham Young as his 2nd plural wife (out of some 45-55 wives total), without first divorcing husband Henry or gaining his consent. Henry sued for divorce in 1846 and in 1847, the Massachusetts State Supreme Court granted them a divorce on the basis of her adultery with Brigham Young.

She and daughter Charlotte Ives Cobb migrated to Salt Lake City, Utah in 1848. Charlotte md. (1) famous Mormon dissident, William S. Godbe. After Godbe's excommunication, Charlotte then married John Adams Kirby, who was twenty years her junior.

Augusta Adams Cobb Young died in Salt Lake and was initially buried next to Brigham Young and his civil wife, Mary Ann Angell Young. However, daughter Charlotte (now a dissident from Mormonism herself)) then had Augusta exhumed and reinterred in the Kirby family plot in the Salt Lake City Cemetery on February 3, 1907. A monument was placed there in Augusta's honor, but only recognizing her married name of Cobb to avoid any hint of her marriage to Brigham Young.

She is the grandmother of the famous Chicago architect, Henry Ives Cobb.

........Only the posthumous marriage to Joseph is certain. In fact, Cordelia Morley, one of these women, stated in a memoir that she never married the living Joseph Smith. Thus the practice of marrying Joseph posthumously had begun by the time of her proxy sealing.8

Frost Stearns Pratt married Parley P. Pratt, not Joseph, for eternity during Joseph's lifetime, so she is probably another early posthumous-only marriage to Joseph.10

Thus I arrive at thirty-three well-documented wives of Joseph Smith.11

I believe we can rely on this smaller number with a greater degree

of confidence than previous estimates, and that a certain or nearly certain sample of the wives allows us to make an overview that will tell us a great deal about the women themselves, about Joseph, and about early Mormon polygamy.12

(I should also note that Joseph Smith proposed

to at least five additional women, all of whom turned him down..........."

Just thought I would add this little tidbit, on another marriage, this one after the death of Joseph Smith.